00:00You guys, so tonight's not the first screening, the veteran screening was the first one.
00:03Tell me why that was so important to have that be the first screening in L.A.
00:07Yeah, I mean, American Legion is a home for all veterans where we come if we need help,
00:12if we need to get together to help each other out.
00:15And so I think I wanted them to be the first ones to see it.
00:18It was made for them.
00:19L.A. is a veteran played by Cosmo Jarvis.
00:22So I thought it was important that they be the first ones to see it.
00:25Everyone that's come down the line tonight has praised you guys,
00:29but also just said what a singular experience this has been for them.
00:32I mean, you've made a lot of movies in your life.
00:34Tell me how this one, why you feel like this is just obviously so much different
00:37and what this brotherhood means to you.
00:40It was absolutely a singular experience for me, too.
00:44The reason it was singular was him.
00:47It was working with Ray.
00:50And did you know, because I know you hired him before on Civil War,
00:54when did this conversation turn into something more?
00:56We were in the post-production period of Civil War.
01:01And, you know, I'd worked closely with Ray during that film.
01:06And while editing stuff, I just called Ray up and said,
01:10hey, are you interested in doing this?
01:12And he said yes.
01:13And we just worked from that day, pretty much.
01:17And you lived this.
01:19And I love what you had to say about to hire these actors,
01:22they had to have fire in their guts and they had to have the right attitude.
01:24Tell me about that.
01:26Yeah, I think that was important based on the schedule that we were going to be running.
01:29We didn't have a lot of leeway for error.
01:32And so I needed everybody firing at all cylinders, which includes the crew, included us.
01:37And so, yeah, we all worked in concert to achieve this great objective.
01:40You put a movie out last year that landed at a certain time in our political landscape.
01:44This one is also coming out at a time when people are thinking a lot about politics.
01:48I think, also thinking a lot about war.
01:52I think my feeling was that there is never, like, a bad time to try to make an honest war film
02:02or book about war or play or poem or whatever it is.
02:07The thing that was available to Ray and myself was to make a film.
02:10And I would also say it is a particularly strange time because conflict feels so close and so present.
02:21But to be honest, it would always have a place, an honest account of war, any decade, any year.
02:29And then can I ask you, too, I really loved what you had to say because it felt honest as well about
02:36you weren't even able to process what had happened until many years later,
02:40put the pieces of your memory together to actually have a conversation.
02:43How are you feeling now about it after, you know, being knee-deep in the trenches on this film
02:47for the past couple of years and then on the eve of its release?
02:50Yeah, a lot better. It's been therapeutic along the way.
02:53Alex was critical in that.
02:55But I think each time we show this, getting that stamp of approval,
03:00it's like less weight on my shoulders to finally, you know,
03:04we'll see what the public has to say about it.
03:07But from a veteran's standpoint, I think we're united for the most part in that front.
03:12And that's the most important thing to me.
03:14Not to embarrass this guy, but I got to change some positive energy here after what I did.
03:19What did you learn from him?
03:20Hey, you didn't do anything.
03:21I learned a lot from, you know, obviously film techniques
03:28and how to, you know, extract emotion, you know, out of scenes.
03:34No, I mean, I learned...
03:37It wasn't so much what I learned from him as what he provided for me,
03:41which is like a platform to...
03:43Someone to trust to express, you know, those emotions and trauma
03:47that have, like, pushed down for a really long, long time.
03:49So it was more of a, I think, just like a group effort
03:53and the trust that we built that means more to me.
03:56Amazing. Thank you so much.
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